Talk:Monty Python's Fliegender Zirkus

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I seem to remember the Pythons on their reunion tour (particularly Eric Idle), talking about the 'German' Python series. Statements like " Ve haff no sense of humour and ve vould like you to help us get one" and them also talking about "Writing the scripts, getting them translated into German and then having to learn them phonetically".

84.130.119.234 19:21, 29 June 2006 (UTC)Reply

I don't know about the latter, but the former was true only of the first episode of the pair. Michael Palin says that to this day, he can still sing "das Holzfäller-Lied" in German, having had to learn it phonetically. --JohnDBuell 22:30, 29 June 2006 (UTC)Reply

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Latest comment: 15 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

I would be intrigued to know how the episodes were received ? Are there any reviews ? Does the existence of only two episodes imply failure ? Did it change the face of German comedy - any native homages ? de.wikipedia.org doesn't help much. --195.137.93.171 (talk) 17:16, 20 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

I've once seen producer Alfred Biolek who had initiated the whole thing give an interview about it for Harald Schmidt's late-night show. The problem were mainly the members of the broadcasting council of WDR who didn't understand the show's humor and hated it. The fact that none of the Pythons themselves had any grasp of German whatsoever and had to learn their lines like parrots certainly contributed to it, it must have been arduous for them. John Cleese's German pronounciation certainly is far from "perfection" as claimed in the article here, though he (along with Eric Idle reviewing the "Shakespeare with cow actors" play) is understandable at least somewhat by me as a native German (subtitles would've certainly helped a lot with most of that first episode, as exciting as it is for a change to hear their original voices in German instead of the dubs commonplace for their theatrical movies and the usual subtitling for their TV show over here). The German article mentions their thick accents and how TV audiences back then thought the reason they were THAT undecipherable was supposed to be funny exaggeration.

Another note: Sat.1 back in the late 90s tried to air the original BBC Flying Circus in a dubbed version, but the result was an angry outrage by German Python fans who for decades had been used to subtitling, calling the undertaking sacrilegeous and blasphemous, especially so because Sat.1 for this operation deemed blasphemous from the beginning hadn't even made use of the Pythons's standard, established dubbing voice actors from the theatrical movies which are still the same post-2000 whenever any of the Pythons appears in any movie, such as Fierce Creatures, for instance. The only time this standard has ever been violated successfully was in Gilliam's Brazil where Michael Palin's voice actor (Michael Nowka) was replaced with Eric Idle's one (Arne Elsholtz), probably the reason no German Python fan ever complained about Brazil was because of Palin's cunning, unscrupulous character Jack Lint which perhaps didn't seem to fit his innocent, charming standard voice. --79.193.55.54 (talk) 19:19, 22 December 2009 (UTC)Reply